Hello OHI supporters! We haven’t reached out to you for a while but we haven’t been idle! Here let us update you with a few of our most recent activities:

The OHI 2016 Annual Report has been published! OHI is five years old now, and is being used for assessment and management in more than 20 countries. The full report is available to download, but here are some highlights from 2016:

- With the addition of Africa, on-going, independently-led assessments (OHI+) are being implemented across all inhabited continents.

- Mexico publicly committed to using the OHI as the structure for the national Interdepartmental Commission for Sustainable Management of Seas and Coasts.

- The United States of America included the OHI in their first-ever National Ocean Plan for the Northeast Region.

Lead OHI scientists gave a webinar on Open Channels titled: Drivers and implications of change in global ocean health discussing the changes in OHI scores over five years (2012-2016), possible causes and consequences of those changes, challenges and opportunities for composite indicators to incorporate the best available science each year, and lessons learned in repeating and improving the OHI assessment each year.

OHI was featured in Samoa’s national newspaper, the Somoa Observer in April this year: Conservation International highlights oceans in Samoa. OHI program manager Erich Pacheco went to Samoa to conduct a national workshop. Since Samoa is a very influential country amongst the South Pacific island nations, commitment from Samoa will pave the way to more engagements with other Pacific countries and forming regional management alliance. To see more OHI activties in Samoa, check out their Facebook page.

Coming up soon…

SDGs: the OHI is expected to be an indicator for the The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water.

A new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution by our OHI team is coming out next month! It is about how we dramatically improved the way we do our science by embracing data science and open science. We discuss how this has powered our work with the OHI, since OHI+ groups around the world are able to build off our science and code. We hope by sharing our story we will encourage more groups to embrace open and collaborative practices in their own science for management.